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Are There Transitional Forms in the Fossil Record?

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  21 July 2017

Kevin Padian  and
Kenneth D. Angielczyk
Kevin Padian
Affiliation:
Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140
Kenneth D. Angielczyk
Affiliation:
Department of Integrative Biology and Museum of Paleontology, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-3140
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Abstract

The record of the history of life, as preserved in the fossil record, is not complete for reasons related to erosion and deposition, preservation and sampling bias, and approaches to analysis of the information provided by fossils. Incomplete knowledge is not unique to paleontology; the record of extant humans is no better for many questions of human genealogy. The problem is not that there are no or few transitional fossils; it is rather that, given the incompleteness of the fossil record, it is unreasonable to expect to find transitions of forms rather than transitions of features. The use of cladistic analysis largely overcomes this problem methodologically, but does not itself improve the fossil record. However, when the characters of fossil and living taxa are analyzed cladistically, they can tell us not only the sequence of origination of clades, but also how functional, adaptational, physiological, and behavioral transitions took place. In this way, hypotheses about the origins of major groups and major adaptations can be tested by standard scientific methods. In contrast, notions of the ontology of these groups as explained by “Intelligent Design” are vacuous and untestable.

Type
Teaching Evolution Convincingly and with Clarity
Information
The Paleontological Society Papers , Volume 5: The Evolution-Creation Controversy II: Perspectives on Science, Religion, and Geological Education , October 1999 , pp. 47 - 82
Copyright
Copyright © 1999 by The Paleontological Society 

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